Hellnotes reviews CHIRAL MAD

Since 1995, Hellnotes.com has provided horror genre news and information several times a day for free. Critic David Searles has written a review of CHIRAL MAD, which includes my short story, “Mirror Moments.”

“Every contribution is well written and literate…”

In his introduction to editor Michael Bailey’s Chiral Mad, an anthology of psychological horror, Thomas Monteleone tries his best to explain the book’s theme by defining “chiral” as a chemical term describing asymmetric molecules.

Huh?

It’s possible to finish this enjoyable and often-brilliant short story anthology with no clear understanding of its title or theme except for a vague sense that you’re dealing with realities much like our own but composed of molecules that are just a tick lacking in symmetry. Life as we know it is just a bit … askew.

For instance, there’s R.B. Payne’s “Cubicle Farm,” wherein a poor wretch of a call center drudge has one of those days at work, but it’s without apparent end.

In Monica J. O’Rourke’s deceptively simple “Five Adjectives,” a second-grader reveals a little more than even she thinks she knows about the character of her father when asked to write a 350-word essay.

And in Gary McMahon’s “Some Pictures in an Album,” the ultimate tale of paranoid creepiness, a man sees himself as a child in a collection of family photographs of which he has no memory. In many of the shots, he’s standing in the vicinity of a mysterious door he doesn’t recall ever having seen before.